Lotus Notes

Christopher Horrell

Jul 28, 2003 — 1 min read

When you spend most of your day on a computer you develop strong feelings about the applications you use as part of your job.

I have strong feelings about Lotus Notes 5 in that I hate it.

Why? Where do I begin. Actually, I think the best place to start is the interface. Whenever I want to change a setting (like how internet links are to be opened) it takes me at least 5-10 minutes to find where the settings are. There are, at last count, 3 areas on the menu to choose from (two under the File menu, not including submenus, and one under Actions) plus one in a location of the interface whose name escapes me at the moment. Add to that the 3 icon bar widgets, one of which changes depending on what you're doing, and you have quite a mess. It's not just ugly, it's damned near impossible to navigate and nothing is in a familiar location. Creating links to files or websites is cumbersome and unintuitive and the spell-checker always gets caught on URL's and email addresses. Adding attachments is no better and don't get me started about booking meetings. It's too bad really since it's a pretty sophisticated application with a great deal of features. The implementation is just, well, crap.

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